Digital Future

Visual effects wonks (like me) who are lucky enough to live in L.A. may want to show up on Thursday, November 18 for the Academy's Science and Technology Council program “Visualize This: Previs in the Making of Star Trek." Using clips and behind-the-scenes footage, a panel led by Star Trek writer-pr...

I invited indieWIRE critics Leonard Maltin and Eric Kohn to join me in a debate about the present and future of 3-D for Moviefone Movies. Here's a sample (read the full piece here):Maltin kicked off the conversation with his take on 'Jackass 3D' opening with $50 million a few weeks back. "I felt the...

In a groundbreaking digital media event, Wednesday the Paley Center for Media, Big Live and SnagFilms are mounting the synchronous American premiere of Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia. It marks the first time a film has premiered with a post-screening panel simultaneously to a t...

Morgan Freeman, 73, is having quite a year. He started off 2010 with his fifth Oscar nomination, for playing Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood's Invictus; his latest movie, the well-reviewed comedy thriller Red opens on Friday; and he may actually land David Fincher as the director of his 15 years-in...

The always fascinating Gawker Media czar Nick Denton has yielded a colorful New Yorker portrait by Ben McGrath. Denton gets the new journalism, and I love that he paints himself as a better alternative than the truly frightening new new journalism, the rising tide of content farms: “I think of us as...

In a welcome sign that the studios are recognizing the hazards of retrofit 3-D--even if done well--Warner Bros. is dumping the idea of releasing Deathly Hallows Part I, the penultimate film in the Harry Potter series, in 3-D on November 19. (An IMAX release will proceed.) Smart move--although the st...

Heading toward Halloween, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will celebrate the evolution of creature technology on October 21 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. "Monsters in the Movies" will include an on-stage discussion with industry technical experts plus film clips t...

Drake Doremus' low-brow Sundance comedy Douchebag, which opened in New York over the weekend, is about two brothers, one on the verge of marriage, who go on a wild goose chase to find the other's fifth grade girlfriend. While some big studio films (Tron: Legacy comes to mind) have developed iPhone a...

It's amazing how far the 3-D clock has turned in a short time. In classic Hollywood fashion, the industry seems to have cooked its own 3-D goose in just a few years. After talking theater owners across America into building some 5000 digital cinemas equipped with 3-D projectors, the studios have jumped eagerly onto the 3-D bandwagon, throwing one movie after the other into shoddy quickie retrofit post-production. While high-quality early efforts such as Avatar ($3 billion worldwide) and Alice in Wonderland ($116 million opening weekend) pulled in huge percentages of 3-D patrons, audiences swiftly got pickier about what they were going to pay ...